JP said
I couldn't find a reference to only VB and was surprised to discover this. I should've read the reviews first. Just the same you'd think this important bit of information would be on the cover. I like these books for the writing style - just a personal preference - and bought this book along with the C# 2008 book for the coverage of LINQ. Oh well...
John David Young said
This was a basic introduction to ASP.NET 3.5 - good for someone who has no experience with ASP.NET, but not detailed enough for someone who has worked with ASP.NET 1.0 - 3.0.
samcsharp said
This book is great for both geeks and 'regular' people.
What I liked :
- good pratical coverage of LINQ (LINQ to SQL, LINQ to objects). Not complete, for covering all LINQ subtilities would require to buy books devoted to LINQ (like 'LINQ in action', or 'Pro LINQ'), but here, it's really practical : you immediatly have the pleasure of using LINQ and see it work fine, in conjunction with a ListView or drop down list filled with the result of your LINQ queries
- good intro to painless Ajax
- extremly clear explanations
- code samples that work. I typed most of the code in Visual Web Developer to play with all the samples and got them compiling and working fine.
- writing style.
What I didn't like :
- VB code. I'm a C# guy. But googling each time my translation of VB into C# failed wasn't that hard. And that allowed me to discover great bloggers. On top of that, the framework is the same : so learning about a new class in this book is useful whatever .NET language you usualy use. I seems the C# version of the code of this book is on the author's website.
I have to say that I already studied C#3.0 and ASP.NET3.5 in other books. So most of what I read in this book was a good way of reviewing and completing what I already more or less knew. But it's obvious the author is a great teacher : often, he answered a question that I asked myself in the next paragraph.
So if you like to learn by doing, buy this book.
M. J. Ryan said
This book is huge value for money!
It has taken me seven weeks to work my way through it. ASP.Net 3.5 is a very broad topic, and so to give it the `For Dummies' treatment would have been quite challenging, and required quite some dedication by the author, Ken Cox.
Quite apart from the book, owners get access to a website with downloadable examples for every chapter in VB or C#. There is also a forum on this website where Ken will assist you, should you have problems with the examples. I can attest to receiving assistance over the weekend!
By the end of the book:
* You will have some familiarity with all of the new v.3.5 controls, AJAX, Linq, consuming object data like RSS feeds, XML, video, Flash, etc.
* You will have been introduced to the starter kits, developed a shopping cart, and been given a thorough grounding in debugging and error trapping.
The book concludes with a discussion on deploying to a hosted site, and then ties you into the community of ASP.Net developers by advising which blogs, newsgroups and forums to subscribe to.
If you consider that you get all of the above, and a working familiarity with all of those technologies for the cover price of the book, it is amazing value for money.
I was able to take those learnings and refactor them into my code-base without problems. I have also had a couple of ideas for saleable software products, and already made a start on them.
Not exactly "This book changes lives," but certainly, "This book gives you a huge leg-up on your job!"
Mike said
Mr. Cox did a great job writing this book. It is very well laid out, and the material is easy to digest. I learned a lot from the book, and I am quite pleased.
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